Parents and students pack a school board meeting this month at Ramapo High School with signs in support of kindergarten, music and art. / Mareesa Nicosia/Journal News

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A state law that entitles 5-year-olds to a public education regardless of whether a school district has a kindergarten program is giving East Ramapo officials reason to pause as they consider what programs to cut — namely, kindergarten — from their already bare-bones budget to stem a multimillion-dollar deficit.

State education law says children who turn 5 on or before Dec. 1 are entitled to attend public schools in the district they live, no matter which grade they start in.

According to Harry Phillips of the state Board of Regents, that means eliminating kindergarten wouldn’t necessarily produce savings because those youngsters presumably would enter first grade in the same district. Classroom space, teachers and supplies would have to be provided.

“New York state requires a legislative change if we want to make kindergarten mandatory, but since under our education law, students have the right to enter public education at age 5, if a district eliminates kindergarten, a family could still say, ‘I’m sending my child to school full-time,” said Phillips, who represents the board’s 9th Judicial District, which includes Rockland.

East Ramapo Superintendent Joel Klein appeared to agree with the rationale in an interview this week following a Board of Education meeting where teachers and parents who’ve fiercely opposed cutting kindergarten spoke up about the law.

“We’re totally aware of the law and we just became aware of that recently, and we will definitely take that into consideration when making any decisions,” Klein told The Journal News/LoHud.com Thursday.

He said the district could accommodate “some but not all” 5-year-old students who otherwise might enroll in kindergarten but would have the option to enter first grade if the program were cut. He couldn’t specify how much it might cost, but said it could exceed what would be saved by eliminating kindergarten.

“That was one of the options, and now it does not appear to be an option,” Klein said. “If a parent has a right to place their child in a first-grade class, then we would have to go and perhaps open up classes.”

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The district already has maxed out its class sizes and laid off dozens of teachers to save money.

Some 700 children are enrolled in kindergarten. Officials have calculated they’d save more than $2 million by shutting the current half-day program for the rest of this year. The savings could amount to $3.8 million for the full 2012-13 school year, officials say.

Officials are under pressure from the state Education Department to make cuts to balance the $191.9 million budget, which is required by law. Officials say the deficit is at least $8 million, an estimate that has risen steadily from an initial $1.78 million at the start of the school year. The state sent East Ramapo a letter this week directing the district to submit a plan to address the deficit by Jan. 2. Klein indicated he will seek an extension.

Without kindergarten, East Ramapo parents could send their children to private schools for the first year, opt to keep them home a year before first grade or move out of the district. But in a district where about 70 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, many parents might lack the resources to do so, school board member Suzanne Young-Mercer said.

“If it were so easy for parents to just get up and go to another district, they would have already gone because the services are so sub-par,” said Young-Mercer, who is also the secretary of the Rockland County School Boards Association.

Of concern, too, is the question of students’ educational development and whether a younger child would need extra help to meet standards set by the first-grade curriculum, Klein and Young-Mercer said.

Cutting elementary music and art — which has been proposed to save $2.6 million over a year — also could pose a legal problem, since districts are obligated to provide first- through sixth-graders with arts and music instruction. State law says they can’t charge a fee for legally required courses.

The school board plans to consider the budget cuts Jan. 8, the third consecutive meeting where a vote could turn the potentially devastating proposals into reality. Hundreds of parents, students, staff and community activists turned out at two meetings in December to protest the cuts.

Also, East Ramapo has been cited by the state for the third time in less than three years for improperly placing special-education students in private schools when public school placements were available. In a letter to the district Wednesday, the state said the district failed to show it has corrected its noncompliance with the law as identified in two prior state reviews, in April 2010 and February 2012. The state also found the district has a pattern of placing students in programs outside the district based on a “need” for Yiddish bilingual programs when they weren’t found to have that need.

Klein said Friday he hadn’t received the letter and declined the comment. School board President Daniel Schwartz declined to comment for this story.